by Ryder Stacy
FREEDOM’S PERIL
Nearly a hundred years after Russia’s thermonuclear first strike turned America into a radioactive wasteland, the brave survivors and fierce FreeFighters of that shattered nation have forced the brutal Sov invader to the peace table. But a new and unexpected danger suddenly appears in the skies over America—from orbit. Someone is reactivating the ancient space systems of the 1980s . . . one by one the nuke-armed space missiles of the past change orbit to threaten every major population center of the world.
Ted Rockson—the ultimate soldier of survival known as the Doomsday Warrior—knows there’s just one way to defend mankind from fiery annihilation: secure the old satellite-killer X-17A spaceplane and ride up to destroy the damned satellites. But when Rockson maneuvers the powerful ramjet alongside a bizarre, jerry-rigged orbital space station, he discovers a strange breed of space survivors—and an old archenemy with the power to turn Earth into radioactive cinders.
DOOMSDAY
WARRIOR
“AVALANCHE!”
ROCKSON SCREAMED.
He raised his left hand and circled it fast—the team signal for primo trouble. He looked up and saw that the wall of boiling white was halfway down the slope and gaining fast, chewing up everything in its path—shrubs, trees, boulders all sucked into snowy jaws.
“God,” Rock hissed through clenched teeth. “Don’t let these men die, this mission fail!”
Suddenly it was all a blur. The roar of the avalanche filled his ears, his mind, his entire body. And then a final explosion of snow and ice threw Rockson from his feet into a darkness blacker than the pits of hell.
ZEBRA BOOKS
are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
475 Park Avenue South
New York, N.Y. 10016
ISBN: 0-8217-2458-4
Copyright © 1988 by Ryder Stacy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
First printing: September 1988
Printed in the United States of America
One
It floated like a hovering firefly in the vast blackness of an intergalactic swamp. Earth. How small it looked from up here. How shining and perfect, like an extraordinary pearl lying in the darkest of seas. A pearl just waiting to be plucked and taken. Col. Killov, his skinny arms resting against the cool metal frame, looked through the purple-tinted window of the spaceship Talon at the vulnerable planet below.
The Earth was like a woman lying down there—motionless, cloud arms outstretched as if in waiting. Waiting to be ravished, impaled. And Col. Killov, deposed leader of the KGB, would be the one to ravage her. For his excitement came from power. Only power. The rape of governments, of whole lands, entire continents. This was his sexuality. Pure unbridled merciless power dispensed with an iron hand. Those who obeyed him lived, those who didn’t died—and always in most unpleasant ways. For that was how Killov manifested his rule—through terror. He was a master of fear and pain. And that entire shimmering blue and white planet would be his through the application of such. And the things he would do to it and to its helpless masses sent a surge of heat through his shrunken loins.
He reached inside his jacket—so overcome with a surge of emotion did he become—and took out a Primatab. Thank the dark gods, those who had abducted him and placed him aboard the Talon had a full supply of drugs, among other things. For the Colonel needed drugs. He was an addict of numerous substances. And though he could do without some of them, he couldn’t do without at least a few basic psycho-chemicals. He had been taking the substances since he’d first been sent over to the United States as a young officer in the KGB—to consolidate and maintain control of the masses—and the Soviet Red Army troops as well. He had had access to all that he wanted then and his drug habit had begun. Then he had taken everything that he could get his hands on, using the mad energy of the chemicals to drive him beyond the humanly possible, enabling him to work his way to the top through betrayal, double dealing, assassination.
He stayed awake for weeks, months, at a time, plotting at his desk. And as he ate less and took more and more of the drugs, he grew skinnier and skinnier, until Killov resembled nothing less than a human skeleton. A death figure in human clothing.
The “Skull” they called him, though never to his face. And even the Elite Luftwaffe Space Corps, Space Neo-Nazis who had brought him up here into orbit around the earth in their powerful warship, the Talon, called him that as well: The Skull. The Faceless One. For he was more tendons and bone than flesh and muscle anymore. His flesh had sunk into him like moss settles down on a bony hill. And what did show was jaundiced, diseased, like a man with malaria and a few other diseases as well. But it wasn’t malaria that shrouded Killov in such an aura of death—it was his own black spirit. Even the burning soul of A. Hitler had nothing on Col. Killov.
He popped down two of the Supervals to get him up, and then a Secsynth and a Neurostretcher to get him down and cool him out. It was always a delicate balance with the drugs—an up, a down, an in-between. But Killov was an expert in that as well. He was a master of all that was found in the dark regions of men’s hearts. That was why he had learned how to manipulate them so well.
Within seconds he felt the rushes stream through his blood. The glow, the golden glow that fueled him in his dark designs. Fueled him like flesh fuels the ghoul, blood the vampire. Killov stared down at the Earth and had an overwhelming urge to stab at it, to tear it apart with his bare hands from up here. It looked small enough for him to. And his maddened state grew wild, frenzied, so that his rat eyes bulged and glowed like red lava pits as he stared down pressing his hands against the thick spaceglass, as if he wanted to break through and throttle the beautiful blue and white living creature below. Throttle and strangle and mutilate it with his long bony fingers until there was nothing left but fire and blood, the blue turned to black and the white to red.
It was his destiny—to destroy. And those who had “kidnapped” him from imminent death inside a volcano (where he had been trapped by Ted Rockson and his merry band of rebels) would now be his new army to carry out his destiny. They thought they controlled him. But it was the other way around. It was laughable really; all those who had tried to use Killov in the past, those who had tried to manipulate him for their own designs—had lost. Had lost their power, and their lives, and a few other things along the way. None had won.
Killov smirked, his eyes almost twisting around in his skull as he saw one, then two, then three Earths below him. And they were all tumbling around each other like thrown dice in a gutter. And Killov knew no matter how they fell—he would win.
Two
“This way, Rock,” Dr. Pedersen, one of Dr. Shecter’s top science Chiefs, led the way up the steep winding stone stairway. “Watch your step up here, this is some of the worst of it,” the white-jacketed astronomer said, as he pointed with his lantern toward the stairs ahead. Rockson could see that many of the steps were cracked, crumbling beneath their feet even as they moved.
“Not the greatest architecture,” Rock commented dryly as he slammed his knee against a hard outcropping. It had snuck past his vision in the flickering shadows of the lantern held high in Pedersen’s pale hands.
“The place was never much of anything,” the astronomy chief went on, coughing from the dust that they stirred up around them as they walked. “It was just an emergency exit from the old highway tunnel system in which Century City was originally built. When the nukes hit, this one survived the explosion. It wasn’t found for nea
rly fifty years and then it was dug out by hand and shovel to clear the debris from the bottom step to the very top. We tech boys claimed it as our own. The telescope has been up top five years now, since Shecter’s ambitious atmospheric observation team went into full functioning.”
“Explain that to me again, would you?” Rockson asked as he slowed down so as not to bump into the slow-footed Pedersen a few steps ahead on the stairs. These science types were all the same, Rock thought, pale, skinny and not quite on balance. They spent all their time locked up in Shecter’s labs discovering this great invention or that new cure for some mutant genetic disease. The science chief was nothing if not productive. It was Shecter and his teams that had given Century City its many marvels of technology in a world that had for the most part de-evolved to the primitive, the monstrous. Rockson sure as hell wasn’t going to begrudge all the tech boys for the fact that they never went out in the wastelands, were not of the same breed as the fighting men Rockson usually found himself with.
“That whole space observation program I mean,” Rock went on. “I lost track of it several years ago after the proposal for putting a space telescope up on the mountain was voted through the Council—amid raucous debate as I remember.”
“How unusual,” Pedersen muttered and even in the darkness Rock could feel the venom in his words. And in a strange way he suddenly felt close to the guy, for he had had his share of problems with the Council as well. They also serve who stay inside and work in the unventilated laboratories deep beneath the mountain that held the hidden Free City.
“We get opposed on every goddamned project,” Pedersen went on. “But somehow Shecter, through his powers of persuasion, manages to get a few more dollars through—and we do it. The telescope was hard fought for. The military members wanted a ground-oriented scope that would be used more for local mountain observations of Red search and destroy operations, so they could set up a more complete early warning system. But Shecter opted for space observation. There’s a hell of a lot of junk up there—both radiation and debris—and we felt it was time to start seeing just what was hovering up there above our heads.”
They came to the top of the winding broken stairs and Rockson breathed out a little, realizing he had been tense the whole time he had been on the narrow stairway. Not that it was much better ahead—a dark tunnel about five foot high that was sandwiched from all sides by black granite. Pedersen began walking along bent over. Bats and other things flapped and slithered off in the darkness of the long tunnel system. Rock felt his claustrophobia creeping up on him. He was a man of the outdoors—not meant to be squashed in a sardine can made of stone.
“We began our observations trying to catalogue just what had been left up there,” Pedersen went on. “And discovered to our horror that there was all kinds of junk, tens of thousands of satellites, pieces of satellites, missiles, empty booster stages, you name it . . . It had either been shot up there before the Nuke war—or left in smokeless flames after the Star Wars systems virtually obliterated one another.”
“The Star Wars?” Rock asked as he ducked even lower when the ceiling above dropped down a few more inches. How the hell anyone had ever had the nerve to go through all this every time they used the telescope was beyond him. He wasn’t a cave person.
“Most people don’t know about it. It was a whole other war, Rock. One that was fought in the upper atmosphere just as we had our lower atmospheric war down here. There was a vast shooting war between missiles and antimissiles, satellite systems equipped with everything from laser beams to antiparticle generators to thousand of smart bombs. You name it, it was up there—and it was shooting when the shit hit the fan.”
“Must have been like the Fourth of July,” Rock muttered cynically.
“Oh, it was, it was,” the head space tech replied just as darkly. “A radioactive Fourth of July which has poisoned the entire atmosphere from the stratosphere to the ionosphere. It will remain like this for hundreds, if not thousand of years—an area up there with so much radioactivity and dark twisted junk floating around that we renamed it the Death Zone.”
“So nothing can live up there?” Rock asked, not knowing exactly who the hell would want to go back up—or who was capable of it these days. “No spaceship could get through?”
“That’s what we thought, that’s just what we believed,” Pedersen went on as they came to yet another opening in the ceiling of rock above them, and the tech began ascending a metal ladder, this one clearly of ancient origin as the rust had formed so deeply and coagulated so firmly over it that it had hardened in calcified fossilization, and was now firm though sharp where the rust crystals had grown out from the surface.
“We used a computer to catalogue it all,” the scientist continued, talking in a gasping voice as he rose up step by clanking step. Rock waited until he was a few yards up, so that if he fell, which didn’t seem at all impossible, he would at least have a second or two to react. “I’d say we have about ninety percent of the big stuff, maybe thirty percent or so of the smaller Death Zone space objects on disc. But all of a sudden, about a week ago—we see a lot of new activity. And I mean a lot. Like the dead dancing in the graveyards.”
They reached the top of the ladder and Rock crawled up after the head tech. They were in a dimly red-lit plastic dome about ten feet in diameter and through it—though there was a thin camouflage netting covering most of it—Rockson could see the entire cosmos above, bursting in all its infinite glory. And he gasped and felt his heart speed up from the sheer beauty and power of the stars and galaxies like flakes of endless, unfathomable snow. Over at one side of the dome a tech was peering through a large telescope that was mounted on a crude pulley and gear system. The main sat on a bicycle-like device and by turning the handlebars to the left or right and using the pedals of the bike, he could apparently alter the angle and direction of the eight-foot scope which protruded through the plastic dome.
“It seems so exposed,” Rock commented, not being used to offering up his flesh to the Reds in such an indefensible situation if they should suddenly show on the scene.
“With netting—it’s really not visible from above. We pull in the scope during the day and close down shop. Anyway, haven’t been detected yet.”
“How are they doing?” Pedersen asked, leaning over and addressing the man in the bike/telescope arrangement who was peering with great intensity into the device. Wires ran down from the sides leading to two computers below on a table. Two more techs monitored these intently, taking down notes on pads of recyclable paper. Evidently the computers enhanced images.
“Busier than ever,” the man in the telescope unit said, stopping for a moment and looking up. He jerked when he saw Rockson standing alongside Pedersen and stiffened, his hand coming up to his forehead in a salute. Ted Rockson, a.k.a. the Doomsday Warrior, was a hero to more than just the oppressed and slave classes of America—he was a larger than life figure even to his own people in Century City. Ever since he had arrived as a teenager years before, making his way across the country after his entire family had been killed, mother and sisters raped by KGB death squads, Rockson’s legend had grown. Stories of how he had spent years in the mountains leaving C.C. for months at a time. And it was even said he could communicate with some of the mutants—like the feared Glowers far to the West. This plus his great military prowess, his near dissection of Red forces throughout America, his involvement in casting out Col. Killov and much of the KGB, had all earned him a special place in the heart of every man, woman, and child in Century City. And though they tried not to, not wanting him to feel uptight in his own home, their actions altered noticeably whenever the Doomsday Warrior was around.
“Here, please,” the man in the bike seat said, rising as he let Rock take his place. “It’s focused on it.” Rock sat down at the scope. He had never been up here and had to admit that it was pretty fucking nifty even for Shecter’s miracle boys.
“You guys never stop tinkering, do you?” Ro
ck laughed as he glued his eyes to the viewing lens of the scope.
“Tinkering is what science is,” Pedersen laughed as he looked down at the computer monitor to the right of the scope. The screen was in dull amber with mesh grids over them dulling them even further. They couldn’t chance an errant Drone spyship flying overhead and catching a glimpse of light on their photon sensors. “Turn the scope a little to the right,” Pedersen directed Rock. “Turn the handle bar—the scope will follow.” Rockson did so and suddenly saw the object of everyone’s attention spring into view.
“Jesus, what the hell is that?” he asked with suddenly dry lips. For floating there high above him, in the star-splattered darkness of the exosphere, was an immense wheel. A half-wheel really, though there was a thin frame clearly in place for the rest of the wheel, giving it a sketched but circular shape. The half that was complete was lit up—hundreds of windows.
There was clearly activity, and lots of it. And his tongue shrank even smaller in his mouth as he saw a winged ship suddenly come alongside the wheel and lock onto it. And the spaceship brought the wheel into perspective. The ship was large, yet it wasn’t a hundredth the size of the half-wheel. It slowly spun like a smashed bicycle wheel that had been in an accident and had half of it sheared right off.
“How big is—”
“It’s five miles wide we estimate,” Pedersen said. “We’d had it on catalogue in the computer system for over a year. But it was dead, a steel coffin all those months. Then it just started up a month ago. A little at first, just a few lights—we thought it was a faulty solar-battery system that had suddenly charged up. Then boom! All of a sudden it was like they were moving to build a city up there. Don’t know who it is, or what the hell they have in mind.”
“But what is it?” Rock asked, turning the pedal of the bike slightly to raise the scope and keep up with the orbit. “I had no idea we ever had whole space stations up there. Did I miss something from my history books?” Every member of Century City underwent rigorous schooling equal to the best of the old American universities. And that included a thorough grounding in America’s past—her economic, social, and military history.
